How to Get Your Employees to Stop Job Hunting

Studies show that engaged employees generate an average of between a quarter to a third more profits for their companies. Fantastic, right? But here’s the question: do you think that most of your employees are engaged?

If you answered yes, chances are you’re dead wrong. According to one eye-opening study, fewer than a third of all employees can be classified as actively engaged at work. Put another way, some industry statistics show that 66% of employees are disengaged and 60% are actively looking for work.

This rampant disengagement or semi-engagement hits where it hurts – your bottom line. As HR.com writer David Bator put it, since you pay a disengaged employee 100% of their salary for 50% effort, if we assume that the average salary of an employee in a 500 person organization is $50,000, then the annual cost of disengagement for that company is over $8M, or $34,200 per day.

Yikes.

So what can companies do to reverse this trend? How do you keep your employees engaged in their work day after day, month after month, year after year?

Sure, positive employee recognition is a great way to make people feel empowered, and by extension more engaged. But a party or a gift basket will only deliver a temporary jolt of enthusiasm and won’t do much at all for the greater dynamic of your organization.

Let’s talk about some longer term strategies and tactics that will.

The driving goal here is that each and every member of your company has a great answer to the question, “Why do you work here?” And the answer shouldn’t be “the pay” or “the half-day summer Fridays.” Salary and benefits alone do not lead to employee engagement.

What does? Well, it has to be something that feels like it originates from within each individual employee… something that empowers them. Something that makes them say “Listen to what my coworkers and I did the other day…”

Now, I hear what you’re saying: “But Ryan, we did the ropes course with the whole design team last year! Eight out of ten “trust falls” went great, too!” (OK, I know no one said anything like that. Surely it was a 90% success rate with the trust falls.) And the answer is no; the usual seasonal-engagement crutch of holiday parties in the winter and cookouts in the summer simply doesn’t work as the sole “cohesion creator.”

Instead, to keep your employees enthused and engaged, you need to have programs that your employees feel that they are a part of every day. And these initiatives must make employees feel like they are contributing to the company, yes, but also, in the most successful instances, like they are a part of something even bigger.

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Great points, Ryan. An organization cannot grow or thrive without employee retention…and an engaged staff equals a retained staff. In the staffing industry, our clients are always looking to us for new ideas to engage employees.

In my blog post, I touch on some of the points you outlined above. My top four keys to engagement are involving staff in important decisions, scheduling time with employees, using awards and recognition tools and investing in your staff. You can read more here if interested: http://www.forbes.com/sites/causeintegration/2012/07/10/how-to-get-your-employees-to-stop-job-hunting/3/

Ryan’s right. Absolutely this works. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lays the foundation of understanding why. Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” presents research validating the motivational concepts of autonomy, mastery and purpose. But don’t let “autonomy” confuse you. People like being in teams, and that includes formal and ad hoc work teams. You can extend these concepts beyond corporate sustainability efforts to attaining any organizational goals, whether that means a cross-functional team serving a customer, or a wellness program to embed fitness in employees’ daily lives. Providing the means to find and create opportunities, show mastery, and socially engage on an ongoing basis is a catalyst and key to employee engagement.

Volunteer projects are great and can help people become more connected to their colleagues. But the author seems to ignore some of the biggest factors that keep employees from feeling engaged. I’d rather work for an employer who skips the extracurricular stuff and focuses on the basics: good management at all levels, good leadership, a positive organizational culture, dignity and respect, sound financial management (to avoid repeated rounds of layoffs), competitive pay, and opportunities for growth. Throw in flexible scheduling and telecommuting to make life easier for those of us with demands outside of work, and you have an organization that should have no trouble recruiting and retaining the best employees and keeping them engaged.

No denying it, Janet. You can’t turn a desperate situation around with extracurricular activities alone. But I’ll stick by “salary and benefits alone do not lead to engagement”. I’d expand that to ‘dignity and respect’ and a lot of the other things you mention. Missing them can surely cause disengagement, because, well: “clearly management doesn’t care about me”. Once you get past the basics, however, there’s a lot that can measurably increase engagement. From the studies I’ve seen corporate volunteering in particular can have a very profound effect on employee engagement for all the reasons listed above. Mostly around “not only does management care about me, the company cares enough about me to spend my time and their money on the causes that I deem important.”

Can something as simple as that translate into increased employee retention? With the level of cynicism and mistrust corporations are currently experiencing, I say hell yes it can.

Great point. And some of the most very elaborate campaigns may still be in the realm of the very large corporations. But part of the value in my pointing this out is that there are now software platforms that allow companies of any size to take advantage of these facts to create great campaigns without huge expenses or lots of extra employees.

Until now most of these packages have been extremely primitive, and very expensive. My belief in the power of corporations of all sizes to contribute to their communities while simultaneously improving their workplaces lead me to create the Causecast Community Impact Platform, a new breed of software as a service that gives a single person in a company of any size the power to execute cause based initiatives just like these. Most importantly, they can be employee driven and automated so they don’t need to be long and drawn out, nor expensive.